For everyone asking who is going to pay for the ‘additional work’ IE 7 is going to create, well, go talk to who pays your bills now — your customers! Are you honestly suggesting that you want all future versions of IE to be as badly broken as IE 6? As painful as it may be, the answer is to get everyone using a standards compliant browser as quickly as possible.

Is Microsoft responsible for this whole mess? Sure, it has a big share of the blame. But remember this whole thing started before ANYONE was compliant with ANY standards. Remember the browser war? It wasn’t as though everyone’s favorite (Netscape) was standards compliant either. It was a battle and all browsers were trying to figure out what customers really wanted; everyone was looking for an advantage.

If MS had a little more forsight it would probably have realized there isn’t any money in the browser anyway and since it dominates the OS market it would end up being the dominant browser regardless of the competition. It could have saved the world a lot of money, but Microsoft didn’t have the foresight to see that and instead, we have a mess. It may have been the only company that could have prevented the mess but it surely wasn’t the only one that caused it.

We also need to differentiate between the ‘bugs’ and the ‘differences’. Bugs need to be fixed. The “differences” need “alignment”. If the spec isn’t specific enough, we’re going to have problems. Everyone’s favorite suggestion here is to have Microsoft change their decision and make it comply with Firefox’s behavior. I wouldn’t mind seeing that happen. But from the other perspective, IE is still far and away the dominant browser; maybe the other browsers should change the way they handle it? Or maybe someone should figure out which way is better and create a standard!

Some hacks are going to be problematic and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Software changes…we hope it improves and in this case, we hope it becomes standards compliant. The process of doing so will cause us all a lot of pain — this fact of life was ensured way back when MS didn’t commit to a standards compliant browser back from day one. When nobody else did either.

Go ahead, beat them up about not being any smarter than their competition on that issue. I’m going back to work.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 3:23 am and is filed under Web Developer Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.